Living Artists' Week at Lilydale

This afternoon, we travelled out to Lilydale to view the local exhibition celebrating Living Artists' Week. We also enjoyed seeing the rich green farmlands around the town and the many wattle trees and spring flowers in bloom.

Come weave with me ...

This week was Living Artists' Week in Tasmania. There were exhibitions, workshops and forums in country towns around the state as well as in the cities.

Noel and I attended a two day forum/workshop - "Come Weave with Me" which was presented by Arts Tasmania in conjunction with Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery at Inveresk, Launceston.

The two workshop leaders were:

Virginia Kaiser, who is one of Australia's most highly respected basket artists. She lives at Broken Hill.

Keren Ruki was born in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She came to Australia in 1975. She has tribal affiliations with Ngati Maniapoto, Tuwharetoa and Ngati Mahanga.

There were forum presentations by Lola Greeno - Program Officer Aboriginal Arts, Arts Tasmania; Glenda King - Manager, Collections and Information Services, QVMAG; Lindy Allen - Senior Curator for Northern Australian Collections, Museum Victoria and Amanda Reynolds - Curator, National Museum of Australia.

We had an enriching and very enjoyable two days.

Happy birthday, Telle!

Today was Telle Fisher's 91st birthday. Telle is one of Noel's godmothers. She lives at Latrobe which is about 1 hour away from Launceston - by car. We travelled up the coast to Latrobe to have afternoon tea with her. Telle's daughters, Barbara and Diane were both visiting from Melbourne, so it was great to spend time with them as well. It is several years since we had last spent time with them. Noel has known them since childhood so we spent some happy times this afternoon reminiscing about childhood memories. I also discovered that Barbara had attended Burnie High school during some of the time that I had been a student at the school in the 1950s. Later in the afternoon, Barbara and Diane's cousin, Mark came to bring his birthday wishes to Telle. It was good to meet Mark and hear some of his stories too.

Happy birthday,Toby!

Today it is 39 years since our eldest child, Toby was born. Toby was born in Launceston during a particularly wet August in 1968.

Noel and I spent this weekend in Hobart visiting Toby, Nicole, Dorian and Edie to help him celebrate!

We visit Graeme and Freya Broomhall

We had a very enjoyable visit with Freya and Graeme in their new home in Hobart. It was interesting to hear their stories about the very historic home they purchased and which they are in the process of renovating. As we had not seen them for several years, since they moved to Hobart from Launceston while we were living in Israel ... we had a lot to talk about.

Stephen Walker's water sculpture

The Japanese Garden

Botanical Gardens, Hobart

We spent a delightful couple of hours visiting some areas of the Botanical gardens that we had not seen for several years. We always visit the Conservatory as the displays that are arranged there are always very beautiful. We also walked over to the Japanese garden and on the way we walked past Stephen Walkers impressive fountain water sculpture that he created from pieces of some of Tasmania's unique Huon pine.